The One Percent Doctrine
This would explain a few things, namely various incredulous pronouncements made by the Bush Administration over the past five and a half years.
The title of Ron Suskind’s riveting new book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” refers to an operating principle that he says Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind’s words, “if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.” He quotes Mr. Cheney saying that it’s not about “our analysis,” it’s about “our response,” and argues that this conviction effectively sidelines the traditional policymaking process of analysis and debate, making suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action.
Now, if you assume that something assessed to have a one percent chance of happening is certain, that is a conversion of a one percent chance into a one hundred percent chance. Within this new framework, you assess something new as having a one percent chance. We now arrive at point zero one percent. And, of course, this new one percent, properly a point zero one percent, becomes a certainty, and we start all over again.
Ad infinitum. You go from the scale of the cosmos and move into sub-atomic particles… whatever it was that scientists deemed quarks were composed of a few years back.
The problem comes in that the reciprocal is not followed through — for the sake of a one percent, you are not following through the percentages of consequences in addressing the one percent. Further, the fact that the ninety-nine percent are being bumped up against, and the ninety nine percent turns out to be the reality, complicates the consequences.
Further, when you slide into absolute certainty over what should be one slice out of a hundred, it’s nearly impossible to snap back to the one to one scale on that scale. We’re already in quadraple zero terriotry.